Wei-Meng Lee speeds through the easy setup of a remote-control app employing Bluetooth LEs on Apple's iOS. Using an inexpensive TI SensorTag for remote control, you can prompt your gadget remotely to perform a variety of tasks. Here, you'll learn how to set up your device and system to take 'selfie' photographs, even when you're nowhere near your iPhone.

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Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) is getting a lot of attention lately due to its support in various devices and gadgets. Thanks in no small part to the advent of the IoT (Internet of Things), Bluetooth LE is poised to change the way you build applications that interact with external devices and gadgets. Although Bluetooth LE is just starting to get developers' interest, Apple actually had support for Bluetooth LE very early on, starting from the iPhone 4S.

In this article, rather than walk you through the details of Bluetooth LE programming, I'll show you how to build a selfie remote-control app quickly, using the Bluetooth LE APIs in iOS 6 and later, with a cheap $25 device for the remote control.

What You Need for This Project

For this project, you'll need the SensorTag from Texas Instruments (TI), which you can purchase online for $25. The SensorTag is a low-cost, multiple-sensor device that allows developers to connect to it through Bluetooth LE. The SensorTag contains the following sensors:

Temperature

Humidity

Pressure

Accelerometer

Gyroscope

Magnetometer

In addition to the various sensors, the SensorTag has two buttons located at the top of the unit (see Figure 1). Press these buttons to get your app to perform an action such as taking a photo.